I’ve made these a few times but it’s taken a while to get them to the point where they’re the right balance of ‘easy’ and ‘yummy’ – having cooked them for my hubby and his parents for dinner last night, I think I’m now there

You’ll need:

• A number of large skinless chicken breasts roughly equivalent to the number of kievs required
• A couple of cloves of garlic per kiev
• About a tbsp of butter per kiev
• Some plain flour
• 2 eggs, beaten
• Roughly a slice of white bread per kiev

To make the kievs:

• Put the butter into a bowl, crush the garlic over it and then, using your hands or a fork (I find my hands easier), mix the garlic and butter until they’ve combined
• Put the bread into a blender or food processor and blitz until you’ve got breadcrumbs
• Using a sharp knife, make a slit about an inch or so deep and a couple of inches long into the side of each chicken breast, creating a pocket
• Using your hands, fill the pockets with enough garlic butter that they’re mostly full but you can still roughly close the pocket, sealing the butter inside – I find this is a messy rather than a scientific process, so don’t worry too much about getting it perfect.
• Dunk the chicken breasts in first the flour, then the beaten egg, and finally the breadcrumbs, making sure they’re fully coated, and place them onto a baking tray lined with tin foil
• Place in pre-heated oven at about 200°c for 25-30 minutes, or until they’re golden in colour and the chicken is fully cooked through
• Serve immediately with whatever you like to have chicken kievs with!

This recipe came about as a result of me wanting to try out the Pizza Dough setting on my breadmaker and my husband saying what he most fancied having on a pizza – teamwork or what? I often serve it with homemade Tear and Share Garlic Bread (I’ll put that recipe up here at some point too) and it’s become a staple in our household. You can, of course, vary this recipe in any way you see fit to make it compatible with your husband of choice.

Ingredients

For the pizza base (taken from the dough recipes that came with my breadmaker)

• 300g strong white bread flour
• 1.5 tsps fast-action dried yeast
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 170ml water

For the topping

• A chicken breast
• A few rashers of bacon
• A few rashers of prosciutto ham
• A red onion
• A jar of tomato pizza topping sauce
• Some chilli powder
• Some cajun powder
• Grated mozarella
• Cooking oil (for frying)

Method

Put the yeast, flour, salt, olive oil and water into your breadmaker pan, set the breadmaker to the Pizza Dough setting and leave it to do it’s merry thing whilst you go off and do something else. Mine takes 45 minutes.

When your dough’s finished, transfer it from the breadmaker to a floured surface, knead it for a few moments and then roll it out to make a vague pizza shape that’s about 10 inches in diameter. Transfer this to a greased baking sheet and leave it somewhere warm to prove for however long you have, but ideally for about half an hour – I usually shove mine in the airing cupboard.

While your pizza base is proving, preheat your oven to 220°C (200°C if it’s a fan oven) and get your toppings ready. Put the oil in a frying pan, add the cajun powder and mix together before heating to make a sort of runny cajun paste. Slice the chicken breast into thinnish strips and the bacon into smallish pieces, and fry both in the cajun mixture until they’re thoroughly cooked. Set aside.

Chop the onion, tear the prosciutto ham into slithers and set both aside.

Pour about half of the jar of pizza topping sauce into a dish and add as much chilli powder as you fancy – mix this together and set aside.

When you’re ready to assemble your pizza, spread the newly chillified pizza sauce over your pizza base and add the chicken and bacon, red onion and prosciutto ham. Cover the pizza in a generous helping of the mozarella and put it in the oven for about 20-25 mins, or until the cheese looks as if it’s turning golden and the base has started turning a touch brown at the edges. It may take a few attempts at making this to gauge what’s ‘just right’ and what’s ‘a little overdone’, but that just means you get to eat more pizza finding out

Serve with whatever you fancy, although if you’re sharing it between two, it often does on it’s own with a nice glass of something.

Enjoy!

It’s that time of year again, and I thought that my 30th Christmas on this planet, combined with the work Secret Santa yesterday, warranted a first attempt at making mince pies. After scouring my Christmas recipe book and finding nothing overly helpful (how can you have a Christmas recipe book that doesn’t include mince pies??) I resorted to Google and quickly found this - they really are as easy to make as the title suggests (if you ignore my hands’ tendency to cramp whenever I have to rub in butter and flour, anyway) and were bloomin’ lovely, if I do say so myself!

I’d originally intended to use pastry cutters to make the pie cases and lids but found it much easier in the end to just do as the recipe says – pick small chunks of dough from the main ball, flatten them with your hands (holding the dough in one hand and squishing it with the bit of palm nearest the thumb of my other hand to make a slight dome worked quite well as methods go), and press them into the holes/cups/whatever-they’re-called of your tins. The net result of this is that they looked very homemade (ie: a bit messy) but the pastry tasted amazing and, whilst adding egg to the pastry dough would no doubt have made it possible to roll it out and use afore-mentioned cutters, resulting in prettier pies, I’ll take taste over looks any day.

I did amend the recipe slightly by sprinkling golden caster sugar over the pies before putting them in the oven, which gave the tops a nice extra bit of crunchiness. I also used the best mincemeat I could find – I can highly recommend both Robertson’s Classic and Tesco Finest in this department; I used the former, but have sampled the latter, and both are very yummy indeed!

Between you and me, I quite enjoy cooking and trying out new recipes or adapting old ones, particularly if they fall into the ‘dessert’ department – I love making cakes, biscuits, pastries and that sort of thing, and I try to always bake instead of buy unless I simply don’t have time, or the effort involved in making something isn’t worth it for the result – a classic example of this is pain au chocolat, which take hours and hours to make and don’t taste that much nicer than good shop-bought ones, in my opinion anyway.

Last weekend I gave this a try, and I’d recommend it to anyone as it was really easy to make, can be prepared up to 24 hours in advance (not that it took very long to prepare, but handy never-the-less!), and it’s very, very yummy It even came out looking like it does in the picture which is something I rarely manage. I would, however, bear a few things in mind:

• The recipe says you need an oven dish capable of holding 2-3 litres – I’d say that if you think the biggest dish you have will be big enough, assume it isn’t and buy a bigger one. Mine overflowed whilst cooking and I ended up having to clean the oven afterwards (Top Tip for this by the way: empty the contents of a tub of bicarbonate of soda into the bottom of the oven, pour cold water over it, leave overnight, and wash off in the morning – works much better than any oven cleaner I’ve ever tried, and doesn’t smell!)
• Don’t worry (as I did) about pouring boiling water over it – it looked like a muddy swamp by the time I put it in the oven, but it all sorted itself out whilst cooking and did what it was meant to do
• It’s very, very rich, and only advisable in small portions if you’ve just eaten a big meal – it definitely needs ice cream or something with it too.
• I made a pudding that served 10 for two of us, but it kept really well in the fridge for about a week, reheated well in the microwave (you only need to pop it in for 30 seconds or so), and actually tasted pretty good cold after some time in the fridge

As an added bonus, you’ll probably end up with leftover marshmallows, which you can then add to hot chocolate, which is what I’m about to go and do right now – to the kitchen!